With The Oatmeal’s help, nonprofit buys property to build a Tesla Museum

The 16-acre wooded property was once home to the scientist’s laboratory.

On Friday, a group known as the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, purchased 16 acres on eastern Long Island to create a Tesla museum and science center. Matt Inman, creator of the Web cartoon The Oatmeal, encouraged his readers to contribute to the non-profit’s purchase, calling its goal "a simple feat… only expensive." Inman set out to raise $850,000, but ended up raising close to $1.4 million for the establishment of what will be America’s first museum dedicated to scientist Nikola Tesla.

The New York Timesreports that Inman’s fundraiser saw donations from residents of over 100 different countries. Inman donated the proceeds of the fundraiser to the nonprofit, which purchased the Long Island property from the Agfa Corporation. The corporation used the land from 1969 to 1992, but decided to put it up for sale in 2009.

Ars noted at the beginning of Inman’s fundraiser in August that Wardenclyffe, as Tesla called his estate, was originally intended to be “a vector for trans-Atlantic wireless communications, broadcasting, and wireless power. The site consisted of an (incomplete) 18-story-high transmission tower that topped off a laboratory surrounded by 16 acres of land in Shoreham, Long Island in 1903. By 1917, Tesla had sold the site for $20,000 to pay bills at the Waldorf. That same year, the transmission tower was blown up by the buyers and sold for scrap.”

Now that papers have been signed for the purchase of Wardenclyffe, the ruins of Tesla’s brilliant scientific career will be dusted off and presented to people who have admired the scientist’s work for decades.

55 Reader Comments

Possible, in theory. There have been a number of advances in quantum teleportation covered by this very site.

Quantum teleportation isn't the teleportation Tesla speculated about and is only teleportation on a technicality, as the original still exists, so there is one entity before "teleportation" and two entities in existence afterward. It's essentially a replica, except it gets called teleportation because the original has changed by the time the replica forms.

That's why you need the high powered blender at the bottom of the machine.

Modern laser development has pretty much nothing to do with Tesla's claims and mechanism of a death ray, which was apparently closer (but not identical) to a rail gun in principle and fired solid matter within a directed electric field. Lasers require sufficient knowledge of quantum mechanics, something Telsa had no grasp of (and probably would have disdained, seeing as how he rejected the existence of sub-atomic particles).

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The guy was so far ahead of his time that it appears people are still calling him a crackpot today, so many years after his death. I wonder when we will finally get to the same level of enlightenment that he was able to reach.

There's "so far ahead of his time" and then there's "he was wrong about a lot of things." He was wrong about a lot of things. A lot of it came down to his lack of familiarity with contemporary science and physics and his unwillingness to embrace the advances being made around him. He was also a fairly kooky person. Newton was too, though, so it's not like I'm trying to downplay his real achievements. I'm just saying that not all his claimed achievements are credible and some of them are wrong. This is the kind of mythologized view of Tesla I'm hoping will be dispelled, because it actually detracts from his real accomplishments.

Please... prove sub atomic particles, or any other particles for that matter, exist.

Modern laser development has pretty much nothing to do with Tesla's claims and mechanism of a death ray, which was apparently closer (but not identical) to a rail gun in principle and fired solid matter within a directed electric field. Lasers require sufficient knowledge of quantum mechanics, something Telsa had no grasp of (and probably would have disdained, seeing as how he rejected the existence of sub-atomic particles).

Quote:

The guy was so far ahead of his time that it appears people are still calling him a crackpot today, so many years after his death. I wonder when we will finally get to the same level of enlightenment that he was able to reach.

There's "so far ahead of his time" and then there's "he was wrong about a lot of things." He was wrong about a lot of things. A lot of it came down to his lack of familiarity with contemporary science and physics and his unwillingness to embrace the advances being made around him. He was also a fairly kooky person. Newton was too, though, so it's not like I'm trying to downplay his real achievements. I'm just saying that not all his claimed achievements are credible and some of them are wrong. This is the kind of mythologized view of Tesla I'm hoping will be dispelled, because it actually detracts from his real accomplishments.

Please... prove sub atomic particles, or any other particles for that matter, exist.

From the two biographies I've read of the man, one impression emerges: His reach exceeded his grasp. He kept promising his financiers untold riches from breakthroughs that were "this close" to practical application. He was a one-hit wonder with the AC polyphase motor. He could have replaced Marconi and been close to Edison in the inventor pantheon if he had been content with wireless *communication* as an end point. Instead he just blew by it as an trivial precursor to wireless power transmission. This left Marconi to seize the commercial potential. JP Morgan was "simply" looking for a way to instantly communicate with his colleagues in London and Tesla willfully deceived him to keep the money flowing for his grander ambition.

I must say that I'm EXTREMELY disappointed that no large corporations such as Google, etc. donated to the cause. With their huge cash flow, it'd be nothing to donate a few hundred thousand to something like this and would've been immensely helpful.

In addition to being a tech millionaire, owner of the rocket company whose space rocket is featured on today's front page, and all-around awesome free-thinker and businessman, Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla Motors and has pledged some of his personal wealth to see that the project succeeds. Maybe his example can get others on board.

In 1890 while Edison was electrocuting stray dogs and sick livestock with AC current in front of crowds, miners in Colorado were constructing the first AC power station. Coal for steam machinery was too expensive to import by train boxcar. The station is still generating power, using a penstock of water dropping about 320' from above in the mountains and spraying against a spinning "Pelton wheel" turbine.

Tesla was not impressed with Einstein's relativity theory, insisting that much of it had already been proposed by Ruder Boškovic about 200 years beforehand.

I agree most things he got right, but Wardenclyffe itself was a huge failure. It was suppose to be for telecommunications, he wanted it to be a high voltage transmission tower. In the end Wardenclyffe is just a tower. After that debacle no one would fund any of his work. But from a modern perspective I guess the only part he got wrong was the "high voltage" part, since wireless charging is a possibility.

Warednclyffe was a failure, I will grant you that. However, it was not a technical failure; it was an economic one. The project was funded by commercial interests in electrical power. When the backers realized that one of the goals was "free" electrical power, they feared that it would undermine their profits. The funding was pulled, and the tower was never finished or tested, and all information about how it was supposed to work has been destroyed or died with Tesla.

He was more than unimpressed. He said it wouldn't work, was mathematical bafflegab, and denied the mass-energy equivalence. He didn't think much of Einstein's Relativity theories, but those were the formulation which proved to be the most successful even if all the claimed precursors are taken together.

Tesla wrote:

I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view. (New York Herald Tribune, 1932)

Even while people around him were busy demonstrating how it actually did work. In 1916 Einstein demonstrated that his General Relativity explained the anomalous perihelion of Mercury's orbit that no previous attempts could do as successfully, in 1919 it was demonstrated that the Sun distorts space around itself so that stars behind it would be visible during an eclipse, and in 1925 we could measure the redshifting of light caused by gravity. All of this was going on years before Tesla denounced the very mechanisms that make these phenomena possible, the curving of space-time by mass. Tesla also ridiculed Einstein's idea of mass and energy being equivalent. A scant few years after his death, Hiroshima and Nagasaki played host to the most violent demonstration of mass-energy equivalence.

I'm surprised there isn't already a Tesla Museum. Every podunk town has a tuperware musem or refrigerator magnet museum, but we don't have a museum dedicated to one of the greatest scientists ever? I guess that's a reflection of where everyone's priorities are.

I'm surprised there isn't already a Tesla Museum. Every podunk town has a tuperware musem or refrigerator magnet museum, but we don't have a museum dedicated to one of the greatest scientists ever? I guess that's a reflection of where everyone's priorities are.

I am very happy the campaign was a success...BUT, HAVE I MISSED where we can find out about the ongoing STATUS of the Tesla Museum property acquisition, and plans for...Planning the next steps for the development of the musuem?